Microsoft employees are hooked on the company’s training videos? | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft employees are hooked on the company’s training videos?

wsj.com

76 pointsthunderbong48 comments

Honest question - has anyone here, ever, learned anything deep or useful from training videos? I've worked for many large vendors, many large companies. Training videos are less useful and much longer than just reading the product guide followed by the admin guide for a product. And a good way to start, is a google image search.

Every single training video I've encountered in almost 30 years of work falls into 2 categories: spend an hour on very basic things that are repeated over and over, then insert a couple of very technical, very useless deep dive topics. At the end, you open up the product guide and read it.

The other category is usually a guy recording himself and his screen, doing very technical very useful stuff, and you watch him type commands and do something. This is completely useless - you can't copy/paste into your notes, the commands he types is forgotten in 5 minutes, and at the end, you open the admin guide and read it.

There are some things to be trained on for which the video format was not designed. Things like coding, things like running different commands to deploy something. Why is video training so popular? No one I know learns jack from videos.

I learned that organizations treat employee time taking training videos as an externality with no consequence. That was pretty illuminating.

It’s interesting how places are happy to set up a required training video for an hour that 25k people must take. That’s the equivalent of 12 contractor person years. If I wanted to put out a contract for 25k hours there’s all sorts of reviews and governance around spending $2.5M. But not around having everyone spend an hour.

That and I’ve learned that training videos have to be repeatedly completed even if they are the same exact thing. I have to watch the same exact ethics class every year. It’s the same class. I can’t test out of it, I must sit and watch an unskippable video each year.

I actually think that the first eye tracking no ad skipping tech will be implemented in institutional training videos.

I think you may be missing the point. This is training as “plausible proof that we have compliance in place.”

So if the company gets in trouble they can say, “100% of the employees will get harassment training” or “100% of the employees will get training on insider trading”

Then the second time they get in trouble they say “This was a rogue employee. 100% of our employees are trained. It’s not our fault.”

That people actually change behavior requires a lot more than a training class.

I don’t think me taking the same training 5 years in a row shows any more compliance than me taking it once.

It’s extra effort to figure out who has taken it or not so they just have everyone take it.

I expect that in time, BS courses that show nominal compliance will be shown to be part of a workplace culture of not caring. But I shudder to think what the next form of compliance will be and will likely be much worse than watching a video once a year.

It doesn’t get you compliant. It’s just a matter of the company saying, “Joe who made the mistake took a class in this subject in the past year so it’s his fault, not ours.” And they lose that “he had to know” if it’s been a while since you took the class.

And if they have to give up a half percent of your time for these videos, it’s worth it for them. And usually you parallel process through them anyways.

A company I previously worked for, gave us an overall budget of time costs to the company. Roughly the same size, but we had to cut our training time down for the exact reason you outlined, except it was more of a monetary figure.

The cost of compliance.

I have never learned anything useful at my office-desk-job work from training videos, but almost all my handy homeowner knowledge is from videos. It's a very useful format for physical tasks that are hard to communicate.

I used to be all about text and reading, but YouTube has gotten so niche and good that I learn a lot from YT videos.

Recently there was a conversation on HN about concrete and I could actually see people get some details about the process wrong, meaning I somehow have a slight level of concrete knowledge by accident.

Like "I know Kung Fu" from the Matrix, but about absorbing concrete knowledge?

I've never thought about house projects where I consult YouTube (which is constantly) in that way, and now I'm going to tell my (bewildered) wife I know Kung Fu every time I have to pull a toilet or caulk a sink. Thanks for this connection, stranger.

I find these Microsoft ethics training videos quite cheesy, but I appreciate that they try to keep your attention by falling into neither of the buckets you mentioned. The originally linked news story goes into that quite a bit.

As an alternative, Microsoft provides transcripts of all these training videos, which you can read instead of sitting through the videos themselves. Feels much quicker especially if you don't like them.

My employer pays about $30 for minor suggestions. We get a video address from higher ups every week. I suggested they add a pdf of transcript (not subtitles). They accepted.

I general, when I need to do something fast and I have an idea how it should be done, I dislike video format. E.g. how to bind a file from a host to a docker container.

I liked training videos at my previous employer. They were mostly about company culture and concepts. E.g. video explaining that no process at work is fixed. They all should be constantly improved. It was easy to share it with coworkers, why is it ok to start with imperfect process.

I also like videos when I'm learning something completely new and I see the person doing the video also making a mistake. It gives me confidence, that they are human too, and I can grasp it. E.g. how to make fire in unreal engine.

There’s the possibility they are reaching the rare person who completely lacks self awareness. The kind of person if you tell them about their offensive behavior, they’re genuinely shocked.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s mostly BS compliance, but those kinds of people sometimes do need things spelled out for them.

Also, not everyone is a reader.

Klaus taught me about forklift safety, and I will never shake hands with danger.

> The other category is usually a guy recording himself and his screen, doing very technical very useful stuff, and you watch him type commands and do something. This is completely useless - you can't copy/paste into your notes, the commands he types is forgotten in 5 minutes, and at the end, you open the admin guide and read it.

This is useless for someone typing commands, but I find it invaluable for graphical contexts. Where the heck do I configure X in the massive tree of options? Video is quite useful there.

Some videos are less about training and more about liability avoidence. The audience doesn't have to learn in order to be able to say - well we trained them!

>Honest question - has anyone here, ever, learned anything deep or useful from training videos?

Way back in my childhood (mid- to late-90s), I learned a lot of computing from those "How To" VHS tape sets[1][2] that were being sold for educating/training people coming into the new world of computing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvxhpglQmv4

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh9Wvm2x8Fc

Hard agree.

For learning programming etc I have to wade through recommendations for YouTube this or some other video platform for a channel run by some learning influencer.

All the best online courses I have taken have always been text form.

The one impediment to my learning unreal engine is that every single course is video based. It makes no sense.

Video is for entertainment.

Off topic - If anyone happens to know any non video based learning for unreal engine 5 please recommend

There are very few things I like videos for.

I also don't think i've ever learned something valuable from corporate training, video or not. I never understand when people say companies should train their employees, like they try, and fail miserably, every time.

Deep, no. Useful, yes, but very rarely, and the SNR is quite low. Inventory management is one example where a video can help avoid stupid mistakes. View it as supplementary documentation for cases where there is no product or admin guide.

People learn in different ways. Smart organisations provide multiple pathways. Video, done well, is an amazing way to get an overview. Check out Confluent's intro to Kafka. They're brilliant.

Not sure if this counts for your question but I get a lot of value from Muay Thai and ukulele videos. That said, those are in combination with instruction from a teacher.

This stuff in general, I assume is just there to break you down mentally so you can conform to stuff. It's like when you get suspended in school.

no. but of course microsoft does that. they are basically initech at this stage.

It's interesting: as of when this comment was posted, 3, and maybe 4 of the 5 claimed Microsofties in this comment thread (including myself) aren't the best fans of these ethics training videos.

Which is definitely not a common opinion within Microsoft - they are truly wildly popular, and even the people who don't like them use themes from them as inside jokes that need no explanation. (Examples: All the threads on MSFT Yammer about supposedly insecure or unethical practices - "Did Nelson come up with this??" And the person in the linked news story who dressed up as Nelson for Halloween - I remember how hilarious that was when it got posted on Yammer!)

I wonder if this is just a bit of randomness. Or perhaps this site tends to attract more curmudgeons...

As a training video of its genre, they are great. If we have to sit though this shit, then at least it is well written and produced. But yes, I still don’t like having to sit through them

Used to work there. Out of all the big corp compliance bs, they were entertaining but I would much rather my time back.

If they gave us an option of ticking the boxes saying that we understand what phishing is and that we won’t take bribes I would pick that any day.

Don’t forget the training on not doing insider trading!

Is it still considered inside trading while you are trading from outdoors?

As a newer MS employee, the funny thing about these videos is that employees only have to watch the current "season" (ie: this years rehash of the same training points), but they have plot points that involve prior seasons (ie: prior years' training that covers the same points). It's like jumping into Game of Thrones on season 5.

I am a current Microsoft employee, and I found them somewhat informative but entertaining. It's mostly the ho-hum regarding basic security principles that every employee ends up having to take at most organizations. It's nice to see some effort put into keeping it engaging.

I remember these. They were not as painful to watch as the typical training videos from before.

But it was a storyline that continues from one year to the next, and they seem to expect that you remember what happened a year go. Needless to say, I don't remember what happened in 3 episodes a year ago.

You can always go back and watch the old videos - I think that you're expected to anyway, unlike the pre-Nelson SBC trainings. CELA figures the policies being taught don't change that much, so they no longer repeat all the material in the same detail between seasons/fiscal years.

* Microspeak decoder: CELA is the legal department (Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs); SBC is the abbreviated original and formal name of the Microsoft Trust Code (Standards of Business Conduct).

This reminds me of the Hollywood-style safety videos that airlines started resorting to in recent years.

I worked at a company that was acquired by Microsoft. The training videos are one of the very few things I liked about Microsoft.

What don’t you like about Microsoft?

I’m don’t want to get into it all, but suffice it to say we ended up focusing on mega deals instead of our bread and butter.

> To boost his acting career, Mr. Badoo relocated with his wife from Seattle to Los Angeles a couple of years ago. While home, in between watching the couple’s 1-year-old twins, Mr. Badoo sets up a ring light and does remote auditions for such TV commercial roles as a window washer or a spokesman for flea-and-tick medication. Then he is back to changing diapers.

Damn, what a mean paragraph to slide in at the end of the article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UyHHsCmtoc <-- This local TV news story includes clips that give a bit of a taste of these Microsoft ethics training videos.

Forget not, arguably the greatest Microsoft (UK) training video: 'The Office Values' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKyV-l8i5lg

I'd rather talk about how Microsoft employees aren't getting raises this year, and the bonus pool is getting dropped to a target 80% bonus within the bonus band instead of 100%. On top of DTO and mass layoffs this year.

That's already been discussed quite thoroughly on this website. If you're interested, you can find discussions in the following threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35889709

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35896935

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35895550

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888668

I wonder if this is noise to hide the lack of raises.

Let's just say the timing is suspicious for a puff piece like this.

Do you have an updated link. This URL is not working.

https://archive.is/HWgCM

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